Just read a 681-word article on the dangers to human health of dry-cleaning chemicals, in which a single sentence mentions the potential harm to workers. The rest says not to worry about it unless you live above a dry-cleaner. Eat healthy. Drink less. It’s all about you, America!
If you’d like some historical perspective on the topic of political violence, I recommend the recent In Our Time episode on The Haymarket Affair. It’s a good listen. (If you’d like to escape to an entirely different time and place, try the episode on wormholes.)
In which the antique table apocalypse is strangely freeing
This morning a card table purportedly from the 1840s revealed itself to be a chimera, and a badly reassembled chimera at that, when it suddenly and violently fell over, sending the Christmas tree tumbling into the manger scene. I had not had the thing upside down since I learned enough about old furniture to recognize what I was looking at. Not only are the cabriole-ish legs attached to the base with splines (well—three are, one was), but the base itself was added later, to replace legs that were sawn off just underneath the tabletop.
First art show! All set up at the Boylan Heights Art Walk in Raleigh this afternoon.
Cleaning out my study—sorry, _studio_— I found a bag of handcrafted items I seem to have purchased in past years as Christmas presents but never distributed, and I cannot now figure out who was supposed to get them. “Keep them!” you might say, but I really don’t need a stuffed-animal purse.
Happy Thanksgiving! If you’re interested in foodways, folkways, and weird alleys of American history, you may be interested in this series I wrote back in 2011 as an offshoot of some research on (mostly) 19th-century food and cooking, which I called “The Thanksgiving Issue.”
I love a hickory tree in November.
Experimenting with more complex (and naturalistic) composition. At 8”x10” this is probably the largest carving I can make from a single panel. I like the birds in this one, particularly the little guy at lower left.
Nine markets in thirty days starts tomorrow. Here’s the skinny if you’re local.